[MLton] mlton.org content migration

[Matthew Fluet]

On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 1:10 PM, Stephen Weeks <sweeks at sweeks.com> wrote:
> Matthew is taking the initiative here, so if he is fine with
> sourceforge, then I'm OK with going back to it.  It does seem that a
> unified service will have the lightest administrative load.  As to the
> cost, I currently pay about $450/yr for the mlton.org linux vps, and
> Reactive at least sounds willing to contribute some.  So, I don't think
> we should feel pressured to go for a free solution if an inexpensive
> (hundreds of dollars per year) paid solution will make users' and
> administrators' lives better.  I'm not actually suggesting one, just
> making sure that we're not ruling something out for financial reasons.

Good point.  I think that the fact of the matter is that for ~
$500/yr, one "only" gets a virtual private server, and not a "real
system administrator".  The tradeoff with a service like SourceForge
is that they administer for 260K projects, so one gets relatively
generic services.  But, as a developer focused site, they are services
that fit our needs.

> As to web site, I do think it's essential that people can type
> mlton.org into their browsers and get to the right place, and very
> nice if mlton.org can continue to appear in the web site as they
> browse.  IIRC sourceforge even supported tricks to do this 8 years ago
> when we used them, so I would guess they do now too.

Yes, this looks very easy to configure:
  https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/wiki/Custom%20VHOSTs

> As to web content, I think a static site is completely fine for MLton.

Agreed.  I haven't found a good static site generator, but I also
haven't spent much time looking.

> As to source code, we should initially transition using svn, but I'd
> advice keeping the ability to switch to something more modern (hg,
> git, ...) eventually.

Agreed.  SourceForge.net's version of subversion supports svnsync
(something that mlton.org's old version of subversion does not), which
makes it easy for anyone to backup and clone the repository.

I've actually done some initial work on converting the MLton
repositories to git; something more extensive than just using git-svn.
 I'll report on this some other time.

> Whenever you want to move, just let me know.  I'm happy to make
> whatever DNS changes are necessary (I have mlton.org registered
> through godaddy).

Great.  I'll try to put together a transition timeline.

BTW, I was wrong about being able to use the DNS MX records to point
@mlton.org mailing lists to SourceForge.  So, the mailing list
addresses would change to @lists.sourceforge.net.